Yesterday, according to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was too liberal. Today, he’s not liberal enough. Flailing about desperately for something that will stick on the Illinois Senator, the Clinton camp contrives a patently false abortion mailer questioning Obama’s pro-choice commitment. The mailer says “Clinton has a record of fighting ‘far-right Republicans’ to defend abortion rights, while Obama has been ‘unwilling to take a stand on choice.’” And the facts? “During his eight years in the legislature, Obama cast a number of votes on abortion and received a 100 percent rating from the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council for his support of abortion rights, family planning services and health insurance coverage for female contraceptives. He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive, a vote that especially riled abortion opponents.“
The peg Clinton is trying to hang her hat on is seven times in the State Legislature when Obama voted “present” rather than “yes” on a given abortion-related bill. As was reported over the summer (i.e, well before this mailer was composed), Obama “did so with the explicit support of the president and CEO of Illinois Planned Parenthood Council. ‘We at Planned Parenthood view those as leadership votes,’ Pam Sutherland, the president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, told ABC News. ‘We worked with him specifically on his strategy.’“
So, in other words, like yesterday’s mandatory minimums fiasco, this is another weaselly, obviously false desperation ploy by Clinton’s team. (And one, like the soft-on-drug-related-crimes gambit, seemingly aimed at preemptively marring Senator Obama’s general election viability.) Sorry, try again.